Queering the Address Circuit (Shakespeare, Barnfield, Wroth)
The sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) remain the
most popular of their kind. Some attribute this to bardolatry—
that is, Shakespeare worship—but the fact remains that
Shakespeare reshaped the sonnet form in striking ways:
I. Structure:
abab cdcd efef gg (usually)
3 quatrains and a couplet (also an octave and a sestet?)
II. Dramatis personae:
A.the speaker is a poet named Will, not to be confused or
conflated with the poet William Shakespeare:
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store,
So thou being rich in Will add to thy Will
One will of mine to make thy large Will more.
Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one Will. (135)
B. the object of the speaker’s gaze/affection is—for the first
126 sonnets, anyway—a boy, not a woman
C. a rival poet attempts to win this boy away from the speaker
D.the woman who enters the picture (ca. sonnets 127-54) is
neither chaste nor aristocratic but “dark” (a sign of poverty)
and promiscuous; she is obtainable and obtained by a
speaker who finds their sexual experiences exciting but
degrading
III. Basic narrative structure:
A.an exhortation for the youth to reproduce (sonnets 1-17)
B. love at a distance (because it is forbidden—but forbidden in
what way?) . . .
which prompts an extended meditation on Time and the
speaker’s myriad ways (sonnet-writing, of course, but other
ways, too) of coming to terms with its inevitable
destructiveness (#18-126)
C. the seductiveness of the “Dark Lady” (#127-54)
Caution: given the time constraints of this lecture, this analysis
of structure and theme is necessarily oversimplified; I should
note, though, that Shakespeare moves beyond the conventional
Petrarchan conceits (e.g., the hart/heart; the ship lost at sea) and
is unusually rich in his borrowings of diction and formulas from
patronage, from religion, from law, from courtship, from
diplomacy, from astronomy, and so on.
That said, let’s begin with a procreation sonnet:
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another,
Whose fresh repair if now thou not rewenest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live rememb’red not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee. (#3)
What seems to be the problem here? What seems to be the
speaker’s central concern?
How does the speaker address the youth? Diction? Tone?
Here’s another kind of procreation sonnet, one that might tell us
more about the speaker than it does about the seemingly
obstinate youth:
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment;
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I ingraft you new. (#15)
What distinguishes this procreation sonnet from the other one?
The speaker seems to be addressing Time’s effects on the
addressee, but is it possible that this urgency grows out of Will’s
own anxieties?
To put it another way: does this sonnet really have anything to
do with the addressee?
The speaker’s desire for the addressee to reproduce exposes
another kind of desire, articulated more explicitly in the
following sonnet:
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart but not acquainted
With shifting change as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure. (#20)
In this sonnet Will recapitulates for the addressee (and for us) a
creation myth. To understand the cultural implications of this
etiological myth, let’s examine the sonnet according to its 4-4-42 (and 8-6) structure. As we move through the sonnet, consider
the (re)fashioning of gender and the ways in which cultural
norms govern notions of acceptable vs. unacceptable desire.
One possible formula:
Quatrain 1 + Quatrain 2 = Misogynistic Octave
Quatrin 3 + Couplet = Origin Myth and Deferral of Desire
Enter the “Dark Lady” stage left (actually, she entered 17
sonnets ago, but this is one of the more interesting treatments of
the male/male/female dynamic):
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colored ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out. (#144)
What convention is used to frame this narrative? (Hint: we’ve
seen it in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus)
What do you notice about the speaker’s characterizations of the
youth and/vs. the woman?
Finally, what happens by the close of this sonnet that is a
departure from the abovementioned convention?
***
The verse of Richard Barnfield (1574-1627) shares
Shakespeare’s concern with a triangulated (male/male/female)
love affair. It would appear, however, that Barnfield’s poetry
stirred more controversy than did Shakespeare’s. (Shakespeare’s
sonnets weren’t bowdlerized until the early 1630s.) Consider the
epistle dedicatory to the collection of poetry out of which the
assigned sonnets were dawn:
To the curteous Gentlemen Readers.
Gentlemen: the last Terme there came forth a little toy of mine,
intituled, The affectionate Shepheard: In the which, his Country
Content found such friendly fauor, that it hath incouraged me to
publish my second fruites. The affectionate Shepheard being the
first; howsoeuer vndeseruedly (I protest) I haue beene thought
(of some) to haue beene the authour of two Books heretofore. I
neede not to name them, because they are too-well knowne
already: nor will I deny them, because they are dislik’t; but
because they are not mine. This protestation (I hope) will satisfie
th’indifferent: and as for them that are maliciously enuious, as I
cannot, so I care not to please. Some there were, that did
interpret The affectionate Shepheard, otherwise then (in truth) I
meant, touching the subiect thereof, to wit, the loue of a
Shepheard to a boy; a fault, the which I will not excuse, because
I neuer made. Onely this, I will vnshaddow my conceit: being
nothing else, but an imitation of Virgill, in the second Eglogue
of Alexis. In one or two places (in this Booke) I vse the name of
Eliza pastorally: wherein, lest any one should misconster my
meaning (as I hope none will) I haue here briefly discouered my
harmles conceipt as concerning that name: whereof once (in a
simple Shepheards deuice) I wrote this Epigramme:
To this for beautie; fairest on the earth.
Thus, hoping you will beare with my rude conceit of Cynthia, (if
for no other cause, yet, for that is the first imitation of the verse
of that excellent Poet, Maister Spencer, in his Fayrie Queene) I
leaue you to the reading of that, which I so much desire may
breed your Delight.
Several things warrant notice:
1. the addressee/intended audience: “curteous gentlemen,” or
a coterie audience comprising (mostly) males
2. Barnfield denies, and in this way calls attention to, the
overt homoerotic themes of an earlier work, The
affectionate Shepheard
Here are the opening stanzas of that poem:
Scarce had the morning star hid from the light
Heaven’s crimson canopy with stars bespangled,
But I began to rue th’unhappy sight
Of that fair boy that had my heart entangled;
Cursing the time, the place, the sense, the sin;
I came, I saw, I viewed, I slipped in.
If it be sin to love a sweet-faced boy,
(Whose amber locks trussed up in golden trammels,
Dangle adown his lovely cheeks with joy,
When pearl and flowers his fair hair enamels)
If it be sin to love a lovely lad;
Oh then sin I, for whom my soul is sad. (1-12)
3. as the preface to a new collection of poetry, this defense
prepares—indeed, encourages—the reader to look for
similar themes in the present work
4. the appeal to classical and contemporary models—Virgil
and Spenser, respectively—as a way of explaining away
the carnal desire of The affectionate Shepheard (this is
conventional, but the need to write a justification suggests
that this logic remained unconvincing)
Before we leave The affectionate Shepheard, though, we should
bear in mind an important distinction (and here you’re going to
have to trust me or read the poem for yourself): the love triangle
(Daphnis, Ganymede, Queen Guendolen) isn’t, as it is in
Shakespeare’s sequence, a triangle at all. Rather, Queen
Guendolen stands in the way of—and eventually walks away
with—Daphnis’s object of desire (Ganymede). The second part
of the poem centers on Daphnis’s attempts at transcendence, all
of which appear to have failed. For the poem closes bitterly:
When I poor forlorn man and outcast creature
(Despairing of my love, despised of beauty)
Grew malcontent, scorning his lovely feature
That had disdained my ever zealous duty:
I hied me homeward by the moonshine light;
Forswearing love and all his fond delight. (439-444)
Now let’s consider a sonnet from the collection prefaced by the
anxious dedicatory letter:
Sighing, and sadly sitting by my love,
He asked the cause of my heart’s sorrowing,
Conjuring me by heaven’s eternal king
To tell the cause which me so much did move.
Compelled (quoth I), to thee will I confess
Love is the cause, and only love it is
That doth deprive me of my heavenly bliss;
Love is the pain that doth my heart oppress.
And what is she (quoth he) whom thou dost love?
Look in this glass (quoth I), there shalt thou see
The perfect form of my felicity.
When, thinking that it would strange magic prove,
He opened it: and taking off the cover,
He straight perceived himself to be my lover. (#)
What kind of subjectivity is constructed here, and how is it
different from the speaker(s) of Shakespeare’s sonnets?
What about this sonnet needs defending?
Although I do not wish to conflate poet and speaker, I think it
bears noting 1) that Barnfield didn’t publish much else after the
collection containing this sonnet sequence; and 2) that
Barnfield’s father eventually disinherited him for reasons that
remain unclear.
***
The sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1651?) redress the
conventional subject/object positionality—that is, male
subject/female object—in yet another way: in her sequence the
woman assumes the position of the speaking, gazing, blazoning
subject:
Take heed mine eyes, how you your looks do cast
Lest they betray my heart’s most secret thought,
Be true unto yourselves, for nothing’s bought
More dear than doubt which brings a lover’s fast.
Catch all you watching eyes, ere they be past,
Or take yours fixed where your best love hath sought
The pride of your desires; let them be taught
Their faults for shame, they could no truer last.
Then look, and look with joy for conquest won
Of those that searched your hurt in double kind;
So you kept safe, let them themselves look blind,
Watch, gaze, and mark till they to madness run,
While you, mine eyes enjoy full sight of love
Contented that such happinesses move. (#39)
Here Pamphilia is the one delighting in the gaze.
The transgressiveness of this gesture cannot be overstated. By
co-opting the roles and prerogatives of the male subject, Wroth
creates a speaker who is in some sense transgender.
How was this move received? Some (Ben Jonson, for instance)
enjoyed and were inspired by her verse. Many others, however,
found her usurpation of the pen (read: the phallus) disconcerting.
As Meg Lota Brown and Kari McBride point out, “Lady Mary
Wroth was called both a whore and a hermaphrodite for
publishing her work, the latter term implying that she was a
monstrous combination of male (that is, artistic and creative)
and female parts” (Women’s Roles in the Renaissance, pg. 15).
Another striking feature of Wroth’s sonnets is the address
circuit. The title of the sequence is Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,
but who is the addressee of the following stanza?
Am I thus conquered? Have I lost the powers
That to withstand, which joys to ruin me?
Must I be still while in my strength devours,
And captive leads me prisoner, bound, unfree?
Love first shall leave mean’s fancies to them free,
Desire shall quench Love’s flames, spring hate sweet showers,
Love shall loose all his darts, have sight, and see
His shame, and wishings hinder happy hours.
Why should we not Love’s purblind charms resist?
Must we be servile, doing what he list?
No, seek some host to harbor thee: I fly
Thy babish tricks, and freedom do profess.
But O my hurt makes my lost heart confess
I love, and must: So farewell liberty. (#26)
Who is the addressee here? How is this different from the other
sonnets we’ve considered? Might this be another way of
countering the misogynistic tradition of the sonnet?
***
Each of the writers discussed today manipulate address circuit as
a way of spicing up a highly conventional poetic form.
The devotional poets of the seventeenth century will do this, too,
but in a markedly different way.